Abortion Remains the Left’s Lodestar

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the Democrats fashioned themselves into a permanent, readily identifiable, and divisive faction—“#TheResistance”—in an unprecedented attempt to delegitimize a duly elected president and rollback the outcome of a free and fair election. It’s nearly impossible to overstate how radical this was. And yet, the Left offered more proof of how uninterested it is in even sharing power, let alone wielding it responsibly.

Not to be outdone, the party’s abortion arm has geared up to fight in the “War on Women, Part 87,567,” which was sparked by an eminently humane policy meant to offer some reprieve in a real war zone: abortion politics. Ohio Governor John Kasich last month signed a bill that prohibits doctors from performing abortions in cases where tests reveal the fetus has or likely has Down Syndrome. The legislation goes into effect in March.

Abortion zealots immediately sprang into action. Los Angeles Times columnist Jamil Smith scoffed at the notion that Kasich is a “moderate” for barring discrimination in the womb based upon fetal chromosome count because true moderates like Smith know the “decent” and “compassionate” course of action is for the strong to ruthlessly and violently purge their society of the weak—of innocents who look a bit different from them. Take notes, you misogynistic bigots: To be truly enlightened and “woke,” you must allow nothing to stop the march of History—not even piles upon piles of bodies.

NARAL had the audacity to tweet that the law “shames women” and “exploits them”; the mangled corpses of countless, blameless children were unavailable to comment on how “shamed” and “exploited” being aborted made them feel. Even out-of-staters felt the need to chime in. Renato Mariotti tweeted that, when he becomes the Illinois Attorney General, he’ll “build a wall around reproductive rights and fight any attempt to criminalize abortion.” “Walls are evil!” the progressive shouts—except when those walls protect the “right” to fetal mass murder.

And lest one think these are fringe one-offs, recall that in April, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez were blasted by Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, for supporting Heath Mello, a candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Mello deviated only slightly from the Democrats’ abortion orthodoxy, but that was too much for NARAL. The DNC made it clear that the endorsement was from Sanders alone and not the DNC as a whole. (Mello went on to lose to Republican incumbent Jean Stothert.) And Doug Jones, the newly-sworn-in U.S. senator from Alabama, wouldn’t know what a sensible abortion regulation was if it came dressed as an opportunity to win in a deep red state by a comfortable margin (instead of by barely more than 1 percent) against an accused child molester opponent, Roy Moore.

One wonders if the phrase, “Life unworthy of life”—Lebensunwertes Leben—rings a bell or means anything to these ghouls.

The broader lesson in all this is quite simple: Compromise on abortion isn’t possible. The pro-life and pro-choice positions are mutually exclusive. A country dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”—one of which is life itself—cannot long abide a regime, ensconced in law, which permits the murder of children in utero with impunity and is regarded by many with utter apathy. Or, shockingly, as a positive good! As Lincoln said in his famous “house divided” speech of 1858, a nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free, or, in this case, half-pro-life and half-pro-choice: “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

This also means that those on the Right who are tempted to think that the Left can be an ally in some way if the question of abortion is simply bracketed and pushed aside need to stop being so delusional. If it weren’t abundantly clear before, one would have to be willfully blind at this point not to realize that abortion is the lodestar of the modern Democratic Party, the locus upon which it turns—its central sacrament. And religious zealots don’t compromise on their beliefs.

Democrats will not budge on the nonsensical idea that abortion is “health care” and that a woman should be free to have a “doctor” exterminate the life within her womb. So committed are they to ensuring the continued existence and expansion of the “right” to abortion, they cannot even concede that the barbaric procedure should have to conform to basic anti-discrimination principles. (Ask yourself: Would Democrats allow any other policy besides abortion to be administered with bias based on some immutable characteristic?) Discrimination, hate, and picking on the little guy are first-order evils to our sophisticated man of the Left—except when the little guy being discriminated against and destroyed with the vilest hate imaginable is a fetus with Down Syndrome.

A party that will contort itself so dramatically to keep the machinery of death running smoothly simply cannot be reasoned with, and at the first opportunity, it will betray all “Never Trump” conservatives and squishy right-wing folks who think it can be. Recognizing this, the Right should press the issue, continuing to methodically tighten its legal, cultural, and political vise grips around the Left with the goal of extinguishing abortion—just as we did chattel slavery in the 19th century.

The Democrats make a mockery of the principle of equality even if abortion is left out of the picture—i.e., because they think it most plausibly means “equality of outcome” when the only real and possible equality is formal or procedural equality—but this is beyond shameful and morally retrograde. We cannot allow the Left’s eugenic mindset, a mindset that exists because of the Left’s principles, not in spite of them, to once again take root in modern America.

The Left clearly cannot break this fever, so the Right should do it for them by crushing them at the ballot box, in court, and in the culture. Down syndrome babies and babies everywhere deserve no less.

Deion Kathawa is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a J.D. candidate, a graduate of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and a former Collegiate Network fellow with the Detroit News. You can follow him on Twitter @DeionKathawa